Cal Lutheran Eliminates Tritons : College baseball: Kingsmen win in rout, 10-0, but are too tired to laugh after a tough Division III playoff series.

There are routs, and then there are laughers.

Cal Lutheran routed UC San Diego, 10-0, Sunday to win this best-of-five West Regional playoff series, 3-1, and advance to the NCAA Division III World Series.

Neither team, however, dared to laugh.

The series--played in front of 300-plus fans each day at UCSD’s Triton Field--gave the teams plenty of mutual respect.

The top-ranked Kingsmen, playing in Division III for the first time, earned the right to face defending champion Southern Maine in a World Series first-round game Thursday in Battle Creek, Mich.

That was cause for joy and celebration. But for the most part, there were 50 mentally and physically tired athletes and coaches after this series.

“UC San Diego’s a great team,” Cal Lutheran Coach Rich Hill said. “Either team could have been swept just as easily as not. It really could have gone either way.”

UCSD Coach Lyle Yates: “These were two evenly-matched teams . . . This game is not going to diminish what for us was the greatest regional series we’ve ever been in.”

Yates later said this was the greatest series in UCSD’s history.

After the first three games were won by the designated home team in its final at-bat--the first two games went 10 innings--Cal Lutheran took advantage of four UCSD errors in the first inning Sunday and raced to a 4-0 lead.

The Kingsmen (39-4) also scored two in the second and four in the fourth, then watched their No. 3 starter, junior right-hander Mike Winslow, completely baffle UCSD (28-9-1).

For Winslow, who allowed only three singles, improved to 7-1 and lowered his earned run average 47 points to 2.53, it was his first collegiate complete game. His longest outing had been seven-plus innings 12 days ago, which he had no decision in a 5-4 loss to Cal State Long Beach.

“We have a great defense,” said Winslow, who struck out three. “All I wanted to do was throw strikes and have them put the ball in play.”

It was a poor defense that led to UCSD’s demise. The Tritons, which led the nation in defense in 1986 with a school-record .964 fielding percentage, entered the series at .962, but committed 14 errors.

The four errors in Sunday’s first inning hurt the most.

Triton starter Ryan Flanagan (7-3) struck out two of the first three batters he faced, but the third reached on an error by first baseman David Rex.

Cleanup batter Jim Fifer then hit an opposite-field home run down the right field line to make it 2-0.

From there, three errors on three consecutive grounders led to two more runs, and the rout was on.

“They kind of opened the doors for us with those errors in the first,” Kingsmen shortstop Dan Smith said. “From there, we just ran with it.”

Fifer finished with two hits and three RBIs. Right fielder Bob Farber had two hits and two RBIs. Designated hitter Mike Suarez had three hits.

Rex, with singles in the first and ninth, had two of UCSD’s three hits off Winslow. The other was an infield single by shortstop Guy Cataldo.

Farber and Smith shared most outstanding player honors, and Cal Lutheran placed eight players on the 11-member, all-tournament team.

The real reward, said Hill, was the series itself. Before this weekend, Cal Lutheran had played only a handful of close games all season.

“This was good for us,” Hill said. “This will definitely help us. I said from the beginning, the winner of this regional is going to be well-prepared for any kind of battle down the road.”